In
February 2005, eight UCC ministers from London raised concerns to the United
Church Moderator:

Our concern with the redefinition of
marriage doesn’t grow out of an uncritical repetition of a received text or
unthinking adherence to a loveless and dead tradition or a parochial
moralism…The redefinition of marriage is dependent on the deconstruction of the
conjugal characteristics of marriage which are anchored in biological and
social realities and, for Christians, rooted in Scripture. The Biblical authors used the uniqueness of
the male/female dyad to identify and describe the identity of God and God’s
relationship to the Church. Marriage
redefined loses its specific meaning in Scripture...Your use of the term ‘equal
marriage’ promotes the notion that marriage is an inherently discriminatory
institution that violates the equality rights of homosexuals, and we would
assume, though the United Church is disingenuously silent on this matter, also
the rights whose alleged orientation is bisexual or transgendered since the
General Council had identified such orientations as gifts from God and part of
the marvelous diversity of creation.[i]

Paradoxically,
after criticizing all evangelicals for unchristian
repetition of received Scripture (faithfulness to the Word), Dr. Short refutes
the ministers’ concerns with his own unrelenting faith in pro-gay liberal
theology. He leaves his denomination on
liberalautopilot headed down a willfully planned course to same-sex
marriage:

I understand your point of view to be
deeply Christian. At the same time, I
understand the point of view of the General Council to be deeply
Christian. It is always troubling to
the community when two Christian perspectives can lead to very different
answers to a particular question. To my
way of thinking this often occurs when those in conversation begin from
differing places or speak from differing theological platforms (eg. Natural
theology or Covenantal theology). I
would want to question some of the conclusions you reach from a platform of natural
theology as, I’m sure, you would want to question some of the conclusions
that have been reached from a platform of covenantal theology. The important thing to me is that in the
body of Christ we keep learning from one another, not succumbing to the
temptation to interpret differing positions as signs of unfaithfulness or moral
inferiority...Reservations notwithstanding, I have come to the conclusion after
thought, dialogue, reading, and prayer that the General Council has made the
right decision. Therefore, I am doing
my best to represent the Council’s position faithfully. This is my job. It comes with the office.
I do it gladly and enthusiastically, trusting that where we are wrong
God will forgive…[ii]

Two important themes are discernible in the writings of Darwin and his
fellow naturalists: Gnosticism and natural theology.[iii]

The deity is absolutely transmundane,
its nature alien to that of the universe which it neither created nor governsand to which
it is the complete antithesis…The world is the work of lowly powers.[iv]

Hunter
observes that the Gnostic’s belief in “lowly
powers” was fulfilled in Darwin’s evolution by natural selection - the
theory that life was not divinely created but developed by random chance and
selective survival of the fittest. The
acceptance of evolution, in turn reinforced Gnosticism in modern thought. Wikipedia defines natural theology as theology based on
reason and ordinary experience. It is distinguished from revealed theology
which is based on Scripture and religious experience. Howard Bloom, in The American Religion, writes that
Gnosticism is the most common thread of religious thought today. He calls it the "American Religion" and concludes: "even our secularists, indeed even our professed atheists, are more
Gnostic than humanist in their ultimate presuppositions."[v]

Hunter
records in Darwin’s God that
philosopher Michael Ruse observed that Victorians in Darwin’s time had trouble
with the idea that God created a natural world that often seemed devoid of His
presence. [What Moderator Short alluded
to in his Eightieth Anniversary sermon titled: “Spiritual Roses Are Difficult
in the United Church.”] Ruse found:

Darwin is characterized as one held to
some kind of ‘deistic’ belief in a God who works at a distance through unbroken
law: having set the world in motion, God now sits back and does nothing.

And
Baker’s Dictionary of Theology
characterizes deism as follows:

Negatively,
the deists generally denied any direct intervention in the natural order on the
part of God. Though they professed
faith in personal Providence, they denied the Trinity, the incarnation, the
divine authority of the Bible, the atonement, miracles, any particular elect
people such as Israel or the church, or any supernatural redemptive act in
history… Denying revelation and affirming natural theology only, they yet
generally claimed to be within the Christian tradition. [vi]

The fact that Dr. Short keeps his denomination on
its liberal course is troubling, but not as burdensome as his faith in natural
theology and trust “that where
we are wrong God will forgive.” The latter, is really an
outcome of his belief God will not, cannot intervene. He leads his denomination to its peril. God will not be
mocked. God’s Law is not for
experimentation.

In
1976, a Jesuit priest, Peter Fink, held the same disregard for God’s authority
and Scripture. Unwilling to see
homosexuality restrained by orthodox theology, he argued that pastoral activity
couldn’t be left in abeyance until complex theological questions are resolved
with total clarity. He proposed what he
called “A Pastoral Hypothesis” - a theological experiment testing for
the will of the God of all Creation.
Fink’s hypothesis was that the Church should explore the possibility
that homosexual love is a valid form of human love, and consequently, can also
mediate God’s loving presence. Claiming
an absence of any definitive condemnation of all homosexual activity, Fink
argued that it is a valid theological method to explore this hypothesis and judge
its validity on the basis of its consequences.
He wrote:

If homosexual love is sinful this will
show itself as destructive of the human and disruptive of man’s relation with
God…All I ask here is that the Church employs all its resources in an honest
effort to lead gay people to love, to the human and to God through their
homosexuality.[vii]

God
would not be ridiculed then, nor will He be now or in the future. Roughly a decade into Fink’s Pastoral
Hypothesis, the results of the gay sexual liberation experiment were dead
clear. Trusting that God will forgive
willful apostasy is incredibly disingenuous.
What will it take for United Church evangelicals and outside onlookers
to admit the denomination has been irretrievably hijacked?